Tropical Storm Edouard Hits Southeast Texas — What an Outage Actually Does to Your Electricity Bill

What's Happening

Edouard came ashore near Johnson Bayou, Louisiana — roughly 15 miles south-southeast of Port Arthur, Texas — at about 3:20 p.m. Central on Tuesday, September 1, 2026, with maximum sustained winds near 60 mph, according to the National Hurricane Center; a 90 mph gust was reported at Port Arthur. It weakened to a tropical depression Tuesday night and continued to push inland. The main threat is water: forecasters expected a widespread 3 to 6 inches of rain, with localized pockets up to 9 inches, and the flood risk shifted north on Wednesday along the Interstate 45 corridor toward Corsicana and College Station. Entergy Texas, which delivers power across much of East Texas, pre-staged restoration crews ahead of landfall.

The power impacts are the kind you would expect from a wet, windy tropical system rather than a historic grid event — scattered distribution outages concentrated where lines run above ground. More than 75,000 Texas customers were without power as of Tuesday night, per PowerOutage.us, with the heaviest concentrations in Jefferson, Hardin and Polk counties in Southeast and East Texas — largely Entergy Texas territory. Those figures change by the hour as crews restore service, so treat any single count as a snapshot. This is local wires damage, not an ERCOT grid-supply shortfall: the state grid stayed in normal condition and no conservation appeal was issued.

What an Outage Does to Your Bill — the Part Nobody Explains

Start with the reassuring half. You are not billed for electricity you do not use. Your meter measures consumption. If the power is out, consumption is zero, and the energy charge for those hours is zero. There is no separate "outage fee."

Now the half that surprises people. Fixed charges do not stop. Two of them keep running for the whole billing cycle no matter how many days you spent in the dark:

• Your TDU's monthly customer charge. In the figures we use for CenterPoint Energy Houston Electric — the utility that owns the poles and wires across the Houston metro — residential delivery runs about $4.90 per month fixed plus roughly 4.98¢ per kWh, which lands near $54.71 at 1,000 kWh. The per-kWh part falls when you use less. The $4.90 does not.
• Any base charge or minimum-usage fee in your retail plan. Plenty of Texas plans carry a monthly base charge, and some charge a penalty if you fall under a usage floor — exactly the situation a long outage creates. Both are disclosed in your plan's Electricity Facts Label.

And then there is the one that actually costs real money.

The Bill-Credit Cliff: Using Less, Paying More Per kWh

A large share of Texas plans are built around a bill credit — a flat dollar amount knocked off your bill, but only if your monthly usage crosses a threshold. The threshold is very often 1,000 kWh, because that is the usage level the advertised headline rate is calculated at. Cross it and the plan looks cheap. Miss it by a single kilowatt-hour and the credit is gone entirely.

A multi-day outage in the middle of a billing cycle is one of the few things that can push a normally high-usage Texas home under that line. Here is the arithmetic on an illustrative plan charging 14.0¢/kWh for energy with a $75 credit at 1,000 kWh or more:

This is the same mechanism our 1,000 kWh illusion work describes, just triggered by a storm instead of a mild month. The advertised rate on a bill-credit plan is only true at one usage point. Anything that moves you off that point — a hurricane, a holiday away from home, a mild spell — moves your real rate. If you want to see what your own plan does across the whole usage range rather than at the single marketing number, run it through our free bill checkup.

Four Things Worth Doing Before Thursday

One more, for anyone on a variable or indexed plan: these are the plans with no contractual ceiling on what next month's rate can be. A variable rate can be changed by the provider month to month, and an indexed plan tracks a wholesale formula. Severe weather is exactly the condition under which those move against you. If you are unsure which type you hold, our plan types guide explains the difference and where to check.

The Honest Bottom Line

Edouard has already come and gone as a landfalling storm — by Wednesday it was weakening remnants dropping rain over inland Texas rather than a coastal threat. Throughout, the ERCOT grid stayed in normal condition and no conservation appeal was issued; the outages are local distribution damage, not a supply emergency. Nothing here is a reason to make a hurried decision about your electricity plan.

What is worth knowing, storm or no storm, is that a month where your usage swings hard — in either direction — is a month where a plan built around the 1,000 kWh marketing point stops behaving the way the advertisement implied. That is not a storm problem. It is a plan-design problem that a storm happens to expose. Our methodology explains how we price every plan across the full usage range instead of at the single advertised point.

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